Betwixt the World Destroy’d and World Restor’d

Excerpt

“The raven calls the dawn from darkest night.”

“Is that exactly what he said he sang?”

“As seals on ice, our Mahri-Pahluk’s words

were clumsy, slow, and often not quite right,

but—like my aqqaluk along the hunt,

unerring in his tracking of the bear—

he read the shaman’s dance and heard him drum

the folly of Commander Peary’s dream

of striking out from Pituffik for, what,

ultima Thule, as you deem it now,

after unearthing Ahnighito’s mass

and sailing from Savissivik for home.”

“What then did Mahri-Pahluk say to this?”

“No words, Knud. But soon a sadness fell

to score his face like sudden blood on snow.”

“I thank you, Akatingwah, for this trust.”

Today’s December twelfth, two thousand nine.

Ensconced within Christianshavn’s cozied niche

of cobblestone, canals, and masonry

outside the Danish Arctic Institute,

I smoke a cigarette and nosh the cake

I scored with luck in Christiania

before the march from Amagerbrogade,

where I, with other eco-warriors,

held the CO₂LONIALISM banner.

My eyes still smart from all the pepper spray.

Yet, after showering and changing clothes,

I biked back to the Institute again,

for Rasmussen’s stories invite return.

I pause, admiring the sea at night.

The wavelets slosh almost inaudibly

against the pier beneath where I now sit;

the seaweed smacks of Scandinavia

and complements the hearty bittersweet exuding from this coffee that’s gone cold.

I note the earthy resin of the hash.

Then, close, a shot reports, and shattered glass rains down. A woman laughs. Her date joins in.

Their chortled peals resound like tolling bells.

I hear their love, of course, but also hear

how nuptial ringing echoes certain dirge.

The distant sirens sigh now in assent.

The THC, tobacco, and caffeine

have kicked in perfectly apparently.

I cast my glance at the cipher again:

“The raven calls the dawn from darkest night.”

Whatever, shaman, did you mean by that?

And what about this, Henson, made you sad?

And, Akatingwah, why then share the tale?

And, Rasmussen, how could you end this here

on such a simile as this evokes?

The questions of the wandering mind abound,

but sometimes answers, too, waft overhead.

Of course, an ethnographic find is found

and, rightly, published in its natural state.

Yet, even so, I cannot shake the thought

that something more portentous is afoot,

that shaman, scholar, lovers, and a man

ascending higher than the kite’s cliché

on this historic day that donned the world

in the guise of Hans Christian Andersen

to pen a happy ending to our tale

of due damnation and apocalypse

have come together for some reason here.

The raven harkens to the nevermore

of Poe that Matthew Henson surely knew.

For Akatingwah—and the shaman, too

the bird possessed a spirit just like hers.

To Rasmussen, it was a native trope

whose mythopoesis was evident.

The raven my mind’s eye calls forth alights

upon the exploitation of Greenland.

I see the world’s most northern settlement,

millennia old, whose people must move

for what they’ve been told is the greater good.

I see the endless scrum of ships, whose holds

are stocked with instruments of future war

machines that ferry the makings of hell.

I see the Distant Early Warning fields.

I see the names of bases meant to house

those marshalled superpowers yet concealed—

Camp TUTO, Cape Atholl, Camp Century,

of which the last is spyship’s master front,

where Cronkite himself would

journey to sell

the Agency’s utopian charade, allowing Project Iceworm

to remain beneath a glacial gleam of poise and aim

a fissile volley at the Soviets.

I see how Operation Chrome Dome takes flight

and see the laden B-52

and how it crashes, burns, contaminates.

I pause again to smoke and sip and chew

and trip upon an unexpected thought:

As it began its polar strategies,

the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

cored lines of ice that read like Milton’s verse—

a cosmographical epic foretold—

in how, with hubris, paradise was lost

and how, with grace, it may yet be regained.

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